Based on the picture I would assume that assigning more virtual cores is something new in VMWare fusion. Just like to point out that Parallels has had this for a while. In fact I have two Win7 parallels machines running right now with 3D graphics and its amazingly fast for virtualization.
Based on what picture? The introduction and the changelog clearly state it is an increase, not a new feature. For about 99% of the people it's a useless feature anyway as you need to have twice the amount of physical cores in your machine. This would mean that only the Mac Pro, quad core iMac and Xserve qualify. All other machines only have 2 physical cores (no the hyperthreading stuff does not count!). The feature was actually added in Fusion 2 iirc so it has been there for quite a while.
Yikes, that's a bit of a price hike! It only cost $40 to buy Fusion 1 (with a free upgrade to 2) in the first place.
No it didn't. Fusion has had the same price since the first edition: $79. They also had quite a lot of periods with discounts. With the very first first release of Fusion 1.0 they had a preorder discount that made the price drop to something like $39. If you order at launchday you had to pay $79 again. They did something similar with the private beta for Fusion 3.0, people who did that got a 25% discount.
No price hike, it was always like that
And just like always there are quite a lot of discount possibilities if you buy from sites like Amazon.
Really hope this helps me successfully import my parallels VM. Have been trying (with the help of VMWare tech support) for over a week now. Sigh!
Make sure the guest additions (of whatever it's called) are uninstalled and the vm is properly shutdown. This goes for importing any kind of vm format in any kind of virtualisation software.
It's BS. They always throw out crazy numbers.
Then how do you explain all the posts in the 3.1 beta forum telling the speed has increased a lot since Fusion 3.0. Mind you, Fusion 3.0 has had quite a lot of problems in this area. It seems they have addressed this properly in 3.1. People that have had performance problems in 3.0 report that the problems in 3.1 are gone. Other people never experienced performance problems in Fusion 3.0 (I never did). There is quite a noticeable speed increase regarding suspending and resuming vm's.
As another poster mentioned, increasing the RAM on your system will make a world of difference. With RAM so cheap these days, it's a no-brained upgrade.
With virtualisation there two things that are very important: I/O and memory. You'll see performance increases when using things like a lot of RAM and a ssd. You will notice a big difference when you've got a virusscanner installed and upgrade to an ssd. Suddenly the vm becomes usable. In other words, virusscanners are really bad for I/O performance and a main cause for hogging the system. Microsoft Security Essentials is a great virusscanner that is very easy on the vm's resources and I/O. Virusscanners like AVG however, are the exact opposite (ditch it and get something proper).
Two finger scrolling? are you saying that scrolling sideways works or even that the magic mouse functions work in a VM? I have windows 7 and the scrolling hasnt changed for me?
Parallels 5 supports those features, Fusion 3.0 and 3.1 do not. They're looking into it for a new big release of Fusion though. I don't really care for the multitouch functions, the only thing I'd like is horizontal scrolling. Most operating systems I use don't even support a mouse but I also use Windows and Ubuntu where it comes in handy.
I actually quite like 3.1 but I wish we had all this with 3.0 in the first place. They now need to work on the features to get it on par with Parallels. Parallels has a big advantage in the 3D gaming area, OpenGL in Linux (I'd like to have basic desktop effects in Ubuntu) and with their unity implementation (less buggy).
To get an acceptable user experience with something like Windows Vista or 7 in a VM, you need to assign it at least 2 CPU cores and a bare minimum of 2 GB RAM - and that is not what VMWare defaults to and if you only have a dual core Mac with 1 or 2 GB RAM, that configuration will kill your system's performance.
That's absolutely not true at all. Every Intel Mac is able to run virtualisation decently. My MacBook with 2 GB of ram from 2006 will run Windows without a problem. Running it with less than 2 GB of ram is suicide, things can grind to a halt. In the end it really depends on what you're running in the vm. Visual Studio on such a machine is not recommended and it is obvious why if you take a look at the system requirements.
If you really NEED a virtualization product, then you minimum Mac should have a Quad Core CPU and at least 8 GB RAM.
If you really need virtualisation you need some knowledge which is something you seem to lack. There is absolutely no need for a quad core or for 8 GB of ram. In most cases appointing more than 2 GB of ram will cause performance issues with the vm. A lot of people experienced that using 2 GB for Win7 makes the vm a lot faster than using 4 GB even if they have 8 GB of ram in their Mac. What hardware you need really depends on your virtualisation needs. If you want to run Windows for a couple of simple Windows software that do not run on your Mac and that don't have OS X alternatives it's quite pointless in having a quad core with 8 GB of ram. You'll never ever use it. I have a Mac mini early 2009 with a 2 GHz Core 2 Duo cpu and I never saw that machine go beyond the 120% cpu usage. That means I have 80% left which is quite a lot. I was running 2 vm's (Windows XP and Ubuntu) at the same time.
And why is this? Because to obtain acceptable performance, you need to give your guest OS the very same hardware resources that the guest OS would need on a dedicated physical machine. Just think of it as splitting your computer in half when you launch a virtual machine.
No you don't. You need to give the guest vm whatever it needs. For most people this is not much.
If your host computer has just enough resources to run its own operating system and applications, the performance of the VM cannot be any good. Virtualization makes only sense on powerful host systems - there's a reason why data centers buy those expensive blade servers.
While it's true that when your machine is running on its toes it's not suited for virtualisation, it is not true that this is the very same reason why data centres buy expensive blade servers. In some data centres you can't use those blade servers because they need too much power. It can exceed the power you can get for 1 rack. In cases like that it's a better idea to use several servers instead of a blade. Same goes for things like not wanting a single point of failure.
If you have one of the lower end Mac configurations (Dual Core CPU, 1 or 2 GB RAM), then stick with Windows XP or do not use virtualization at all and use Boot Camp instead.
As I told earlier most people use these systems and are able to use virtualisation without any problems. Windows XP and 7 will run fine. Again this all depends on what you want to run in the vm. If you need visual studio, you'll need more cpu power and more memory and better I/O performance.
Apart from this there is a known problem with Fusion 3.0 and performance degradation of the vm after some time. For some people this happens after 5 minutes, for others it can take 30 to 60 or even more minutes. This is something 3.1 should fix. When you've got performance issues check out things like virusscanners and system resources in both the vm and OS X. The problem might be caused by something else such as a virusscanner (AVG is known for this).
